In today’s classics seminar, my student Dong Wei presented the historical paper by Neyman and Pearson on efficient tests: “On the problem of the most efficient tests of statistical hypotheses”, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Series A. She had a very hard time with the paper… It is not an easy paper, to be sure, and it gets into convoluted and murky waters when it comes to the case of composite hypotheses testing. Once again, it would have been nice to broaden the view on testing by including some of the references given in Dong Wei’s slides:
Listening to this talk, while having neglected to read the original paper for many years (!), I was reflecting on the way tests, Type I & II, and critical regions were introduced, without leaving any space for a critical (!!) analysis of the pertinence of those concepts. This is an interesting paper also because it shows the limitations of such a notion of efficiency. Apart from the simplest cases, it is indeed close to impossible to achieve this efficiency because there is no most powerful procedure (without restricting the range of those procedures). I also noticed from the slides that Neyman and Pearson did not seem to use a Lagrange multiplier to achieve the optimal critical region. (Dong Wei also inverted the comparison of the sufficient and insufficient statistics for the test on the variance, as the one based on the sufficient statistic is more powerful.) In any case, I think I will not keep the paper in my list for next year, maybe replacing it with the Karlin-Rubin (1956) UMP paper…
